For Halloween we now have two racially approved costumes. If you’re still struggling to think of a costume for yourself or your child, I am happy to report that the Black Panther creators and the gal who voices Moana have both stated explicitly that all races are allowed to use their costumes. Whew! The only thing sad about these two linked stories is that we live in a world in which people of various races need permission to dress up as wildly popular fictional characters whom they admire.

As the election nears, the Left escalates its Hitler comparisons. I was listen to today’s Dan Bongino show, and he dedicates the first few minutes to discussing the escalating Trump = Hitler rhetoric from the Left and from the NeverTrumpers who, like true converts and zealots, outdo their new political travelers when it comes to heated rhetoric. Bongino played audio of the various talking heads fighting to come up with the most extreme Trump = Hitler (or ISIS) analogy (I’ve queued the audio to the point at which the Trump = Hitler tape begins):

TV media is not alone. This is a recent headline from the WaPo:

An alternative headline for that same opinion piece could have been “Hitler was an honest leader.”

Even that hardcore socialist (and pedophile supporter) Pope Francis gets into the Hitler comparison act, comparing “populists” who oppose mass Muslim migration to Hitler. His use of the word “populist” interests me, because it’s a reminder that, to the elites, it’s inconceivable that the masses might have a good idea. If the masses want it, it must automatically be bad. Frankly, I don’t see anything bad about Europeans resisting an influx of people who subscribe to an ideology that is the antithesis of everything the West has struggled to achieve over the centuries in terms of civil rights, individual liberty, respect for different races and faiths, etc. The Pope is insulated from this influx behind is walls, but the Europeans being murdered, raped, stabbed, blown up, and evicted by the new immigrants have skin in this game.

Whenever the left is meeting with opposition they retreat into this condemnation of our lack of civility.

They are right, you know? If we shut up and let them beat us, attack us and call for guillotines to kill us, without protest, it’s all very civil. Or at least, there isn’t a fight.

Are you going to do that? Are you going into cowering and apologizing mode because the left is hanging a multiply-convicted felon with an incoherent hodgepodge of beliefs around your necks? Are you going to let them get away with it AGAIN?

Or are you going to answer this the only way you can? With humor? “Oh, please, if he were a real Republican he’d know how to build bombs that go boom. We’re competent.” Or “Yeah? Hey, he hates Monsanto. Weren’t you yelling about Monsanto last week?” Or “Did I hear you beating your chest and apologizing for the shooting of Scalize? The beating of Rand Paul? No? Then take my answer as the same.” Or “You know if you guys didn’t keep felons out of jail this stuff wouldn’t happen.” Or my favorite “Not my circus, not my monkeys. We know you’re a hive mind, but we’re individuals. None of us know this nut.”

Keep calm and “no sale”the left’s bullshit.

And vote. Vote like your life depends on it. With the calls for guillotines and Antifa on the loose it very well might.

The EU continues its bow to sharia law. Speaking of the effect of the elite-approved Muslim invasion of Europe, you probably already read that an EU court in Austria held that the EU’s promise of free expression does not extend to insulting Mohammed: [Read more…]

The disgusting Democrats are waging a despicable battle. They are defaming a good man, and destroying decency and due process, all to preserve abortion.

Disgusting Democrats will blow our republic apart to kill babies. Without any credible evidence and without any credible corroboration, the disgusting Democrats are smearing as a rapist a man who has led an irreproachable life. In today’s climate, people will more readily forgive murder than they will rape, and yet that’s the label they are appending to him in an effort to block a Supreme Court nomination.

This is what happens when you have a “living Constitution.” If the Constitution as written is your guide, it doesn’t much matter what the justices’ personal feelings are. Once you use the Supreme Court as a non-elected Leftist legislature, though, suddenly Supreme Court nominations have the same weight and viciousness as a gladiatorial death match. And if you cannot actually kill someone who owes fealty to the Constitution, you kill his reputation.

Anyone who would use this tactic is disgusting. Dianne Feinstein is disgusting for sitting on these hazy, almost fact-free charges for two months instead of passing them on to investigators or arranging for Ford to testify in private session. The only explanation was that she knew this was a lie, a set-up, a delusional fantasy, or something other than the truth, and held it in reserve in case polling hinted that Democrats might retake the Senate. Disgusting.

Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii is disgusting because she will do anything to prevent Ford from having to back up her vague, contradictory, antique, unprovable allegations:

You know, for any of us to have dealt at all with the experience of sexual trauma knows that this is a very particularly damaging kind of experience. And you do not treat a person who has gone through this like, ‘Oh, well, hey, how about this?’ You know, I think it’s appalling.

Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono (D.) said Democrats could keep the open seat on the Supreme Court vacant until after the 2020 election if Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination collapses and Democrats regain control of the Senate in November.

Hirono pointed to the long vacancy of Antonin Scalia’s former seat as a justification for holding off on confirming any nominee from President Donald Trump. When Barack Obama was president and Republicans held the Senate, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not hold a vote on Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, and Hirono said Democrats could do the same if they had the Senate.

“I think we’ve had those kinds of vacancies before, and we certainly had over a one-year vacancy with Merrick Garland,” Hirono told Politico Magazine. “So the world does not come to an end because we don’t fill all of the nominees.”

This is not the Biden Rule, which holds that a lame duck president doesn’t get to nominate a Supreme Court justice when he’s already got one foot out the door of the White House during an election year. This is an entirely new Disgusting Democrat Rule: Only Democrat presidents may nominate candidates for the Supreme Court, provided that they have a majority Democrat Congress. Under this rule, the Constitutional structure of our American democracy is dead.

Completing her democracy-destroying role, Hirono also jettisoned the idea that all people are created equal and are entitled to equal protection under the law. Instead, she tells men they’re second class citizens:

I expect the men in this country and the men in this committee because we all signed on to this letter to demand an FBI investigation. But really guess who is perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country. And I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up, do the right thing for a change.

Feinstein’s shenanigans still earn her first place as a disgusting Democrat, but Hirono is running a very close second. Both of course, are also horrible human beings, bereft of decency.

These two women are scarcely alone. The entire Democrat body, whether in Congress or in the Democrat-owned media, is throwing itself into this intentional mockery and destruction of our democratic process. I already wrote yesterday about the ridiculous things they’re saying about due process, about integrity, and about equality under the law.

There is little difference between the way Democrats are treating Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court from the way Democrats treated blacks and the Supreme Court in the 1850s — and we know how that disgusting Democrat travesty ended.

On the infinitesimally small chance that Ford isn’t delusional or an out-and-out hard Left liar, her allegations should still be dismissed. As Chad Felix Greene movingly writes, rape can only be proven within a short time of its happening. After that, if you, the victim, choose to remain quiet, you the victim, have to live with the consequences of that decision. (I highly recommend his article.)

What makes this all truly horrible is that, when you think about it, this whole disgraceful kabuki theater is happening for one reason and one reason alone: To ensure that abortion continues to be legal in America up until the end of the third trimester. That’s what this is all about — dead babies. Think of that.

Okay. I’ve finished on that subject. Now to a few other interesting things, and then I’m retiring for the evening to watch something light and silly. [Read more…]

Today is the 6th anniversary of four American deaths in Benghazi. This round-up remembers that day and looks at some current news too — plus pictures!

Remembering the men who died at Benghazi. Today is the six-year anniversary of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Four Americans died: Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone S. Woods, and Glen Doherty. While we still don’t know precisely what the goings-on at the consulate were in the months leading up to the attack, we know that:

Oh, and we know one more thing: Despite the above, Obama last week referred to those facts — all of which point to administrative malfeasance of the worst kind — as a “wild conspiracy theory.”

Now that you’ve been reminded who and what Obama and his administration were, if you don’t vote in November to help keep the Trump juggernaut going . . . well, shame on you!

Please, please, Mr. President, declassify the documents. It’s trite but accurate to say that, in matters of corporate and government secrecy, sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s impossible to imagine that there is anything worse in the still-classified documents involving Spygate than we’ve heard to date from leaks and partisan summations.

Fortunately, though, it appears that Trump, with showmanlike timing, is planning on declassifying the Carter Page and Bruce Ohr documents. If they’re ugly for the president, they’re no worse than the stories already out there and we need to deal with truth, not innuendo; and if they’re ugly for the Deep State, then that’s something very important for the American people to know.

Hillary promotes debunked lie about Kavanaugh. Did you already know that Kamala Harris, working with Planned Parenthood, promoted a complete lie about Brett Kavanaugh? I first became aware of the lie because of a “most read” article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the headline of which claimed that Kavanaugh conflated birth control with abortifacients. I thought, “No way is he that dumb” and I was right. It turns out that the headline was a total lie, as even the Chron article (to which I will not link), concedes deep in the text:

Critics were already skeptical of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s track record on women’s reproductive rights, and the conservative judge only fanned the flames with his comments during Thursday’s confirmation hearing.

While responding to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) about his dissent in the Priests for Life v. HHS case, Kavanaugh referred to contraception as “abortion-inducing drugs.” Kavanaugh sided with the religious organization, which did not want to provide employees with insurance coverage for birth control.

[snipping numerous paragraphs]

Critics may argue that Kavanaugh, in his Thursday statements, was simply borrowing the language of the religious organization. “Either way,” explains the Cut, “the use of the phrase was telling, bringing into the mainstream the slippery conflation of birth control and abortion.”

In other words, the first two paragraphs opening the article were a complete lie, but loony Leftists heard a dog whistle and they’re not going to let go of it.

And who is the looniest Leftist of all? Why Hillary, of course. Just today, despite the truth emerging from under the pillow the MSM was using to smother it, Hillary did what she always does — she doubled down on a substantive lie:

It seems she waited until this claim about Kavanaugh had been thoroughly fact-checked and shown to be false before repeating it. https://t.co/b51DUn31O2

(For those looking for dog whistles here, my phrase “substantive lie” was a deliberate word choice. Lefties love to point out that Trump lies and they’re right. Like P.T. Barnum, he huffs and puffs all the time, but it’s always about things that are non-substantive to American politics and life. In the world of law, his lies are called puffery. In that same legal world, Obama’s and Hillary’s lies are called fraud.) [Read more…]

If Trump is crazy, he’s crazy like a fox. As for members of the media, they are stupid — not stupid in a smart way, but genuinely, truly stupid.

I’ve been mentally composing a post in my head today about Trump’s negotiating tactics with Putin, not to mention his other clever moves, all of which are aimed at cutting through the garbage of diplo-speak or at engaging in functional relationships with un-nice people who nevertheless share planet earth with us and with whom war would get very ugly, very quickly. So, I had all these inchoate ideas and arguments, when suddenly I had before me Dov Fischer’s masterful Everyone is Smart Except Trump.

Having read it, I feel as if all the best ideas, arguments, and jokes I had in my head, all of which were blending in an incoherent (at worst) and dull (at best) mess, got sucked out of me and incorporated into an article that had me saying after every sentence, “Gosh, I wish I’d written that.” Here are some select gems from Fischer’s article, but you’re denying yourself both a pleasure and a learning experience if you don’t read the whole thing: [Read more…]

Newly obsessed with a spike in suicide, Leftists argue that Americans are mean. I contend that the suicide spike is because Leftists have denied us hope.

The recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have brought suicide into the American spotlight. Although an “N” of two is not a trend, the CDC says that there is, in fact, an unpleasant suicide trend in America. According to the CDC, since 1999, America’s suicide rate has increased on average by 30%, with the steepest climbs in the upper Midwest, where suicide has increased by as much as 57%.

Strikingly, the CDC also asserts that more than half of these suicides did not have known mental health risks. All of which forces one to ask “Why are Americans killing themselves in greater numbers?”

As someone who has suffered in the past from serious depression, I suspect hopelessness is a significant factor. When you’re deeply depressed, not only are things bad, they are hopeless.

Moreover, from the depressed person’s point of view, they will never get better. Nothing will change. The depressed person knows deep inside that grim, dark, and awful is a permanent, unchanging condition.

That’s why it doesn’t help if friends say things such as “You just have to get through this bad patch,” or “If you would (get a new job, get out of a bad relationship, etc.), you’d feel better.” Anything that friends tell the depressed person in an effort to steer them away from that blackness is premised on hope. Part of depression, though, is that hope is a delusion. The reality is that it is absolutely inconceivable that things will get better.

I’m fortunate in that I was never depressed to the point of feeling suicidal. Instead, I was a slogger. I slogged through may day, doing what needed to be done, but was deeply unhappy. Moreover, I was unable to make changes that would have increased my happiness because the depression told me (quite falsely) that change was useless. Nothing would improve . . . ever.

Fortunately, the three times that I found myself in one of those dead-end funks, external events happened that forced changes on me. I graduated from the school in which I was unhappy, I recovered from a serious illness that made me unhappy, and a different serious illness allowed me to step back from a job that made me unhappy. In other words, I was always the lucky recipient of a deus ex machina event that broke the depression cycle.

I’ve sometimes wondered how things would have ended up if I hadn’t had an external force to save me from Churchill’s “black dog.” I’d like to think that, like Churchill, I might never have quite abandoned that little spark of hope that keeps one going, no matter how bad things get. In that regard, one of my favorite Churchill quotations comes from a time when he was struggling with depression. As I heard it, he was at a dinner party and, instead of talking to the young woman seated next to him, spent most of the dinner staring unhappily at his plate. Suddenly, he turned to her and said, “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.” No matter his mood, he never lost faith that he had something to offer.

Others, however, lack that little spark, whether because of nature, nurture, or whatever else combines to make each individual’s psyche. For those people, the thinking is brutally clear: if nothing will ever get better, if life will always be, not just hedged about with failure and isolation, but also drab, pointless, and meaningless, why live?

All of the above describes individual hopelessness. This essay asks whether there be societal hopelessness too?

I think there can be. Of course, we know that, no matter the circumstances, there are people whose will to live always burns, offsetting situational despair. That’s why people survive concentration camps and gulags. That’s why they survive poverty and totalitarianism. That’s why they survive pain and fear. We are hardwired, for the most part, to survive. That hard-wiring can break down, though, and that’s where I want to go with the rest of this post — I want to discuss a society in which the hard wiring has broken down or, more accurately, a society in which the dominant culture has deliberately broken the hard-wiring. [Read more…]

The real Russia collusion — Obama and Clinton team with Russia against Trump — makes sense if you look at the motives driving the various actors.

Da Vinci once said that “Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.” Motive is certainly a helpful tool when it comes to bringing an organizing principle to the sprawling, chaotic Russia collusion — the real Russia collusion. The real one isn’t the fake claim that Trump, who had no contacts in Russia, partnered with Putin, who had no reason to root for Trump, during the 2016 election cycle. Instead, I’m talking about the real Russia collusion, one that sees more evidence every day to support it. This is the one that says that Obama and Hillary, along with all their high level minions, conspired with Russia to keep Trump out of the White House.

You might not believe it from my blog silence about the unfolding Russian collusion, but I am paying attention. I daily read multiple articles analyzing the Nunes Memo, and the Grassley-Graham letter. I try to keep track of the cast of players: (1) the various swamp crawlers, from Hillary to Blumenthal to Brennan to Simpson to Shearer; (2) the surprise guest appearances from Obama administration players such as Rice, Lynch, and (3) the rotating cast of regular players at the FBI and the DOJ, from Comey to Strzok to Mueller. Looking at it this way, it’s pretty clear that one of the things that’s truly Russian about this whole scandal is that it has the complexity and character count you’d find in War and Peace or some other epic Russian novel.

After reading and reading and reading, I have to admit that I’m still confused about the specifics (timing, facts, lies, laws lying in smoking ruins, etc.). Nevertheless, the overarching picture emerges clearly from this welter of data: Trump did not collude with the Russians to win the election or betray America, although there were people who were temporarily on the very periphery of Trump’s campaign who would have liked to have seen Trump be even more friendly to Russia than Obama and Hillary already were. Instead, it was the Hillary team, with help from the Obama administration, that either colluded with Russia or were Russia’s patsies in trying to set up Trump.

Understanding which is the real Russian conspiracy has the unexpected byproduct of bringing people’s obvious or known motives into alignment with the emerging facts. The original story, the one that had Trump as the conspirator, never made sense, because neither he nor Putin had a motive to do what they were alleged to have done. Thus, it never made sense that Putin would collude against a Hillary presidency. Indeed, the last thing Russia wanted was for Trump to win. After all, despite his stated willingness to work with Putin, Trump was shaping up to be a nightmare for Putin for one very specific reason: Drill, baby, drill.

Under Putin’s corrupt oligarchy, the Russian economy is a wasteland. Its main reliable source of wealth is oil. The Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to destroy America’s oil-producing abilities were a boon to the Russians. Trump’s stated desire to bring America’s oil back on-line was something Putin would have wanted to avoid at all costs. It was also unclear whether Trump would continue to follow Obama’s lead when it came to Ukraine, Central Europe generally, Syria, and Iran — in all of which locales Obama had withdrawn from traditional American friends or funded foes and, when possible, handed power to Russia.

That’s why, when Steele and others (Brennan? Shearer?) came sniffing around seeking dirt on Trump, Putin and his spymasters must have been beyond thrilled. They knew Hillary could be bought; they knew Hillary would continue Obama’s effort to handicap America’s energy industry; they assumed that Hillary would follow Obama’s disreputable patterns towards traditional American friends and foes; and they probably had enough blackmail material on Hillary to last for six terms, not just one or two. (Not the least of which, as Trump pointedly joked during the campaign, would have been those 30,000 emails Hillary erased from her unprotected server, but which the Russians had probably hacked years before. Even without that, the Russians almost certainly had information about Bill’s myriad indiscretions, Benghazi, and the whole Clinton Foundation.)

Motive is even easier to find with Obama and Hillary. Obama had a legacy to preserve. Obama, who has never been a fool although he is a knave, understood that his legacy was built on sand. Except for Obamacare, he had no major legislation. All he had were executive orders, regulations, “Dear colleague” letters, and a host of other ephemeral directives that would become embedded in America culture only if a subsequent administration made it clear to true believers in government and education that these legal simulacra needed to stay to complete America’s fundamental transformation.

As for Hillary — well, heck, Hillary understands that, if you want to win, you have to cheat. She didn’t cheat hard enough in 2008, but in 2016, by God! She was going to cheat and she was going to cheat big, thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s willingness to support her win at all costs philosophy.

So, if you want motive for collusion, you have it with the Obama administration, the Hillary campaign, and the Putin administration. All of them had a vested interested in ensuring that Trump lost.

But one still has to ask why would career civil servants be so willing to join in? Sure, Trump talked about trimming back the civil service, but everyone talked about it and nobody did anything about it. I think there must have been more than mere job security at issue for same many upper ranking members of the FBI and the DOJ willingly to jettison laws, procedures, and their own past histories of relatively upright behavior.

Before I go on, let me say that I’m not talking about people such as Brennan, whom I believe to be completely corrupt, or truly evil hangers-on such as Blumenthal and Shearer. I’m talking about the others, including people like Comey and Mueller. They were always political and played hard ball to advance their careers, and they were unethical in a “cut-throat office politics” sort of way, but no matter how one points out their viciousness and failures of intelligence, before now, they’d never crossed the line. Had they walked right up to it and put their toes on it? You bet. But cross it ? No.

Hillary Clinton’s sore loser behavior is a direct attack on American democracy. Trump’s tweeting a golf ball meme is an appropriate and mild response.

The media arm of the Democrat party, also known as the mainstream media, is in an uproar because President Trump retweeted a very funny gif that The People’s Cube created, one showing one of his golf balls knocking Hillary down:

Starting this Sunday morning and all day afterwards the world’s most serious and respectable newspapers and magazines (see the impressive list below) have been having conniptions and reaching for smelling salts. Why?

If you are a regular here at the People’s Cube, you may have seen this meme, which is only a funny metaphor of last year’s elections.

The image is obviously a joke. More importantly, it’s a deserved response to Hillary’s latest authorial effort, What Happened.

Reading the book (or listening to anything Hillary has said since November 9, 2016), it’s apparent that Hillary has never about America’s “gracious loser” tradition. This tradition is not a mere formality. It’s an important part of handing over power in a representative democracy.

Democracies retain their character only if people believe in them. (It’s sort of like clapping your hands if you believe in fairies.) Once people become cynical, the people’s party is over and tyranny steps in. So again, the good loser tradition is not mere symbolism; it is important and meaningful.

Hillary, however, is a very, very bad loser. Here are representative quotations from just the first couple of chapters in her book: [Read more…]

This Bookworm Beat doesn’t have a huge collection of illustrations but what it has are damn fine. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll laugh some more.

I’ve been paying bills and taxes, and plowing through Hillary’s What Happened? — and I’m really not sure which task is most distasteful. All I do know is that I managed to miss one of Hillary’s best moments in the early chapters of her book. You see, when she started in on literary analysis, my brain said “Academic virtue signaling,” and promptly guided my eyes to the next paragraph. Had I focused harder, I would have caught this gem of totalitarianism:

And while I’m at it, here are two more Hillary gems, followed by several other amusing and insightful posters and cartoons:

One, the hypocrisy meter just pegged at a new world record as progressives, who saw nothing at all wrong or illegal when Hillary, Huma, and company made an utter mockery of our intel security laws, now find the alleged violation of the same laws in a single, discrete instance to be a “high crime” worthy of impeachment.

Two, this was not a violation of our national security laws.

Three, the people at this meeting were President Trump, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Sec. of State Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. No one else was in attendance. And yet, news of what happened at this meeting leaked to the press in near real-time. I can see no reason why any of the the people in attendance at the meeting would do so. That is breathtaking. There is a real, present threat to our OPSEC that must be addressed immediately.

Here are the facts as we know them. The purpose of the May 10 meeting was, in part, to discuss civil aviation threats in light of ISIS’s work on developing bombs that can be hidden in the bodies of laptop computers and that can pass the rigors of an airport security check. My understanding is that this involves turning the computer’s lithium-ion battery itself into a bomb. Some of the intelligence that Trump discussed was provided by a foreign source. [Read more…]